You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content. Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Oh, love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away, And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon. Yeats The Sorrow of Love The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves, The full round moon and the star-laden sky, And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves, Had hid away earth's old and weary cry. And then you came with those red mournful lips, And with you came the whole of the world's tears, And all the sorrows of her labouring ships, And all the burden of her myriad years.
And now the sparrows warring in the eaves, The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky, And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.
She pulled the thread and bit the thread And made a golden gown, And wept because she had dreamt that I Was born to wear a crown. Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter. Teach This Poem. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Yeats says basically everything in this poem except what the rough beast it is. So what's the answer? The poem is alluding to the Book of Revelation.
The "rough beast" is the Anti-Christ. The scene is set for the final showdown and the Second Coming. Thus, with its unremitting pessimistic tone notwithstanding, the poem at least gives humankind the possibility of redemption.
That having been said, the persona is not necessarily espousing a traditional Christian world view. Written is , the poem is a reaction to the Great War. It conveys the persona's horror at the slaughter that the war unleashed and its socio-political aftermath in language heavy with religious significance. The poem's opening stanza portrays a society spinning out of kilter. But we should be in no doubt that this is as much a spiritual crisis as it is a worldly one: "the falconer" and "the centre" are also God.
It continues by emphasising the scope of the crisis The best, at least, lack the conviction to act. One is "full" while the other "lack[s]". One thinks but does not act, while the other acts but does not think.
Society is beset by chaos, as represented by imagery of "The blood-dimmed tide" and, especially, animals imagery laden with negative connotations: "rough beast", "indignant dessert birds", and the errant falcon.
The worst give in to their primitive urges and themselves become agents of chaos. The second stanza begins with the persona's plaintive cry: "Surely some revelation is at hand". And seemingly it is. The persona is assailed by a fantastical vision "somewhere in sands of the desert", an allusion to the Temptation of Christ, of "A shape with lion body and the head of a man" The "rough beast", its centuries long wait now ended, makes its way to the appointed place for the final confrontation.
The persona equates the slaughter of the Great War and it socio-political ramifications with the biblical end times, although this should not be taken literally. There is a surprisingly literal interpretation to this poem.
Yeats describes a sphinx-like beast arising in the desert. It is entirely possible that this is the "rough beast" to which he refers, and that the metaphorical nature of the creature is there simply to add depth to the poem. Yeats had a bizarre but fully developed mystical belief system, which he outlined in a relatively obscure book called A Vision.
A central tenet of this belief was that history repeats itself in cycles, which he called "gyres". The connection to the first part of the poem is obvious. In the second part of the poem, Yeats mentions the Spiritus Mundi , which is another part of his belief system. The litertal translation is "spirit of the world", which Yeats held to be a collective soul or folk memory, a repository of all cultural history throughout the world.
That, of course, makes Christian culture a tiny fragment of the whole. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Yeats began writing the poem in January , in the wake of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and political turmoil in his native Ireland. But the first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence.
Of course, twentieth-century history did turn more horrific after , as the poem forebodes. A century later, we can see the beast in the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.
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